How to handle the challenges of lacking UI / UX expertise in a Startup

It is a well known fact that a software with good UI & UX always has an edge over the competition and hence achieve better results quickly. Every Startup team know this fact, but unfortunately not all the founding teams would have an UI/UX expert in it or could afford to hire one in that initial stage. Here are few suggestions to handle such challenges in a startup :

1. Seek help (part-time) from friends and relatives :

This world does have plenty of angels in the human forms, who are willing to help someone if they could. Open your eyes and look out for such an UI/UX angel in your friends or relatives circle. Talk to them about your limitations and check if they could help you in some way. If someone steps forward to help you, always make sure that you are thankful to them - a small affordable gift or a 'Thank you' post in your company blog, etc are few ways to express your thanks to them.

2. Professional Freelancers:

If one could afford some money, this is the best solution until a startup could hire a full-time UI/UX engineer. Plenty of such skilled freelancers can be found at HackerNews community and freelancing websites.

3. Twitter's Bootstrap

'Bootstrap' is a simple, easy to use CSS library from Twitter. If the founders have a basic knowledge about HTML and CSS, they could do the work themselves. However, one of the biggest disadvantages of this approach is that there are plenty of websites already using this, hence your website will appear like just another Bootstrap website.

This is a super cool option. With just some 10-20$ one could get a cool UI for a website. Though this might not be the best for all websites, it will certainly help to improve the UI standard of your application. www.wrapbootstrap.com is a good place to find such templates (built over twitter bootstrap and popular jquery plugins)

If there are more suggestions / sites please do mention them in the comments section below. Thank you.